I Write for The Dead, But They’ve Started Writing Back - Finale

 

Photo Credit: StockCake

By Sobowale Oluwadarasimi 

They called it closure, what the agency sold. 

But I had peeled back the veil.

And behind it, I found a machine of curated grief and it ran on blood and beauty. Several clients died on cue, and almost all my metaphors showed up in morgue files. Someone had followed my phrases into the dark and painted their horror in my handwriting.

So I hunted.

I stopped sleeping. I stopped speaking unless it was a eulogy, and soon it becaome a trick I couldn’t unlearn. I traced files, interviews, estate logs, old burner phones, and I found them:

Victor Mallin. He was a former agency staff, and was listed “missing” years ago, but how was he still drawing payments?

Rumors said he’d been a ghostwriter for high-profile deaths. And then, one day, he stopped ghosting.

He started sculpting.

I found him in a crumbling theatre on the edge of the city. The playhouse had been abandoned for decades, but it was still warm. Still used. The stage was littered with wax mannequins dressed in funeral clothes. Some wore my words on laminated cards around their necks. “What a truly mad man,” I whispered under my breath as I stepped cautiously around.

He stepped into the light slowly. Smiling. Thin. Unbothered.

I knew he was in his late fifties, but he looked older and the skin on his face was sallow and was stretched tight over sharp cheekbones. His frame was wiry, almost fragile, like he hadn't eaten properly in years. (Had he really?) His thinning white hair was combed back neatly, his eyes were pale grey, unfocused, but alert, as though he were always watching something just behind you. He wore a black overcoat, the kind undertakers used to wear, and it was buttoned to the top despite the heat. His hands were thin, bony, and stained with what looked like ink or nicotine. He looked calm. Too calm. Like someone who had already made peace with what came next.

“I never had your gift,” he said, in the most irritatingly smug way. “But I had vision. You wrote their ends, I just… edited reality.”

I looked at him. Really looked. No, there were no gods here. It was just a man in love with endings. A complete dramaturge of death. And even if I had a thousand tongues, none could effectively name the manner of hatred I felt for him in that moment. For someone who lived by words, the disgust he stirred in me was too big for language and I knew that if I stayed there for more seconds than I should, I would throw up and my puke would be lettuce green.

But I only asked; “Why? Why mirror the metaphors?”

He chuckled. The puke was rising in my throat.

“Because you see, grief is forgettable. But art? People die for that. You made their deaths immortal. I just gave your art a heartbeat.”

I don’t remember picking up the letter opener from the prop table. I only remember how it glinted like punctuation. The kind that ends a sentence. The kind that means: no more. It didn’t take long.

His blood came out slow, like it was unsure about leaving. And in the echo of his last breath, I whispered with all the vile in me: “He died facing the curtain. A man so obsessed with endings, he became his own.”

I left the theatre burning. I went home and waited to be free. But nothing left me.

Even with the killer gone, the script hadn’t ended. Because the words still came, and they came faster especially when I wasn’t even trying. You’d think they’d come in dreams. But, they came in cafés, in alleyways, and in the subway, as I watched strangers breathe.

I’d see a woman on the phone and I’d think: “She died mid-laughter, like joy refused to let go of her voice.” I passed an old man feeding pigeons: “They found him with crumbs in his palm. The birds did not flee.” At the train station, I saw a mother cradling her baby: “He died before his first heartbreak. Which is more than most of us can say.” The baby began to cry. The mother shivered. And I felt that pull. That sickness. That unholy rhythm. 

If only someone had told me that I wasn’t writing anymore, that I was now leaking, that something had opened in me, something like a faucet that the agency had installed.

Yesterday, I went to the park. Children were playing and there was soft light everywhere. And for a second, I forgot that anything could possibly go wrong with the world. I sat on a bench. Just watching. Just breathing.

And then I saw a boy in yellow. He was laughing too hard and was chasing a red ball across the grass. And before I could stop it, before I even knew I’d started to speak, the words came: "They’ll say he was always full of light. Like light couldn’t wait to leave."

The ball rolled into the road and he followed. A lorry carrying logs loomed ahead. I didn’t move. I didn’t scream. Because deep down, I knew something terrible. I didn’t want to stop it. Because part of me wanted to see if I was still real. If my voice still mattered. If Death was still listening.

I don’t write for the dead anymore. I write them into being. And sometimes, if I whisper just the right line...they arrive.

THE END